Motus Familia

The Project Room Palazzo Tagliaferro is a place where young artists are called to offer a coherent art project, designed for the rooms of Palazzo Tagliaferro, a project that is part of their research.

For many years, the family considered as an institution able to record and reflect the history of the world through the personal stories of its members, is one of the main interests of Giuseppe Fabris.

The artist, who graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, lives and works on the heights of Saint Jeannet in the hinterland of Nice. Over the years, his travels between France and Italy led him to live in Paris. This is where he met, in totally different circumstances, two families whose lives he entered as a friendly observer, but also where he was welcomed as a temporary member. These experiences are developed in several series of works that are presented in this exhibition together with Fabris’ research on his father’s memory of the war and his mother’s memories of a past world which, in many wayus, has made us what we are.

« Motus familia » is the title of this project which is linked to the main Jane McAdam Freud exhibition in a dialogue made possible by the proximity of their themes and a shared sensibility.

« Motus familia » emphasizes the concept of movement, the emotional upheaval that we all experience by participating in the community life of this « micro-society », the family. The family , around which the history and culture of ancient Rome revolved, is the place of protection, shelter, relief, along with the affects and the sheer living together. Its movements sometimes correspond to emotional and psychological changes for those involved.

Fabris’s project is about investigating the meaning of this ancient institution by means of a comprehensive installation enabling us to apprehend the story of three nuclear families and what it suggests to him, through drawings, paintings and video art.

« This exhibition, Fabris said, has to do with my own family and two others I became associated with, as well as World War II and the Vietnam War. It is a kind of micro-epic that starts from my own family, then one I met and ‘adopted’ – for one single day, and eventually another one whose traces and records I found in a dump (photos and objects that belonged probably an old man died).

The work unfolds on various registers: drawing, photography, video, sound and a sculpture made with French newspapers of the years 1938-42.

Fabris starts from a personal and intimate discourse woven with his parents as eyewitnesses of an era that he has no direct experience of, then goes on to deal with his own experience with the family that ‘for one single day’ he rebuilt around the figure of an ‘on the road’ poet who from Vietnam came to Paris in 1968 to escape the war and ended up living on the fringe of society, without giving up his dignity and conscience.

On the other hand, “Family Found” is one made of photographic traces the artist saved from destruction and transformed into works of art by imparting a sense of nostalgia that becomes a concept and an aesthetic practice.

« I find Jane McAdam Freud’s sentence to be very true: ‘I continue to portrait my father to keep him alive’, Fabris says. “I think this is also true for me and for all of us: to take another look at a photo, to repeat a sentence that belonged to our family, a facial expression, a perfume, revives these people in us for a moment, the people we loved, that we continue to love and who live forever in a part of ourselves. »

Nicola Davide Angerame